Lord's Day November 2 2014

By definition, if you preach twice on the Lord's Day, one sermon will be better than the other. That seemed to be the way yesterday certainly. Preaching through the second half of 1 Corinthians 14, I wisely decided to hold some of my principles and applications over to another time and that was a help as well as the fact that we got on to the very germane matter of what preaching is all about. To quote Lloyd-Jones in his famous book on preaching Preachers and preaching
"What is the chief end of preaching? I like to think it is this. It is to give men and women a sense of God and His presence. ... I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate in himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Saviour, and the magnificence of the Gospel."
The evening was more difficult as I spent quite a while going over previous material on the parable of the sower before getting to what I had to say about the stony ground hearer.